Skeptical Quotes - Page 7

• Although individuals may be highly intelligent, they are sometimes dogged by skepticism and doubts. They are clever, but they tend to be hesitant and skeptical and are never really able to settle down. These people are the least receptive.

  Dalai Lama

  Clever, Humility, Pride

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• I am deeply skeptical of re-entering into Iraq's civil war.

  John Garamendi

  War, Military, Iraq

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• In matters of religion a skeptical mind is not a higher manifestation of virtue than is a believing heart, and analytical deconstruction in the field of, say, literary fiction can be just plain old-fashioned destruction when transferred to families yearning for faith at home.

  Jeffrey R. Holland

  Believe, Home, Heart

  "A Prayer for the Children". Speech at General Cnference, www.lds.org. April, 2003.

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• If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.

  Geoffrey Elton

  Historian, Ifs

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• What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Writing, Long, Waiting

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• I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.

  Richard Dawkins

  People, Childhood, Magic

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• Everyone is skeptical. Only the media are not skeptical, but, then, they were also not skeptical when the administration put out the line that coordinated embassy attacks around the globe on the anniversary of 9/11 were just rowdy movie reviews. Numbers on a TV screen won't prevent millions of Americans from noticing that they're unemployed.

  Ann Coulter

  Numbers, Media, Lines

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• If there be a skeptical star I was born under it. Yet I have lived all my days in complete astonishment.

  William Macneile Dixon

  Stars, Astonishment, Born

  William Macneile Dixon (1937). “The human situation”

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• Always be skeptical about simplicity.

  David Byrne

  Simplicity

  "Interview with David Byrne". Interview with Brian Castellani, sacswebsite.blogspot.com. May 22, 2009.

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• The skeptical relativist attempt to mandate a naked public square is undemocratic. It is also a danger to democracy.

  Henry Hyde

  Christian, Religious, Squares

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• What the Republican National Committee did to Ron Paul was the height of rudeness and stupidity for this reason: Why would you alienate an individual who has the ability to attract a new generation of voters, who are already skeptical of your institution but are willing to at least listen through the vehicle of this individual and the words that he is saying? Why would you alienate them, get on the floor and not let them speak? Not have his name go up on the board and see the number of electoral votes that he receives? This is crazy!

  Michael Steele

  Crazy, Names, Numbers

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• [C]apitalism without financial failure is not capitalism at all, but a kind of socialism for the rich.

  James Grant

  Financial, Kind, Socialism

  "A plague on the Wall Street casinos" by Diane Francis, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 17, 2008.

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• Rule of thumb: Be skeptical of things you learned before you could read. E.g., religion.

  Ben Casnocha

  Thumbs

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• A majority of American citizens are now becoming skeptical of the claim that our carbon footprints, resulting from our use of fossil fuels, are going to lead to climatic calamities. But governments are not yet listening to the citizens.

  John Coleman

  Carbon Footprint, Government, Listening

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• I don't need a receipt for a doughnut. I'll just give you the money, and you give me the doughnut. End of transaction! We don't need to bring ink and paper into this! I can't imagine a scenario where I'd have to prove that I bought a doughnut. Some skeptical friend...'Don't even act like I didn't buy that doughnut! I've got the documentation right here! Oh, wait, it's back home, in the file. Under d...for doughnut.'

  Mitch Hedberg

  Funny, Home, Humor

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• At times we feel wounded, hurt, disappointed, disgusted, resentful, sick of it all. At other times we feel skeptical, outraged, robbed, beaten. We chafe, hate, overlook. Then again we feel like ignoring, defying and fighting for every right that belongs to us as human beings.

  Nannie Helen Burroughs

  Hurt, Hate, Fighting

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• In Bergman's world I represented a sort of intellectual, skeptical, ironic person, rather cold and frustrated. When I went abroad and made films in Italy and other places, I was used in different ways. I was rather often cast as crazy people, maniacs. It was very good for me and it was fun because it is nice to play crazy people if you are not in reality. And I think perhaps that changed how Ingmar saw me. Suddenly I was on the more magical side of his world, playing the people with fantasies, variety, the artists.

  Erland Josephson

  Fun, Crazy, Nice

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• But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

  Rebecca West

  Book, Artist, Punishment

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• We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

  Susan Sontag

  Views, Intelligence, Culture

  Salmagundi, No. 31-32, (p. 29), 1975.

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• I should have voted for the first Iraq war. George Bush did that one very well. I had been skeptical. I was afraid that George Bush was going to treat the first Iraq war the way his son treated the second.

  Barney Frank

  War, Son, Should Have

  "Exit Interview: Barney Frank Reflects on Successes, Regrets, Future Plans". "PBS NewsHour" with Margaret Warner, www.pbs.org. December 25, 2012.

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• I have always been skeptical of medical orthodoxies, because sooner, rather than later, so many of them are turned on their heads. Or, put another way, providing you are prepared to wait it out, what was adjudged bad for you yesterday is likely to prove beneficial today.

  Mordecai Richler

  Yesterday, Waiting, Today

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• Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

  Alain Badiou

  Plato, Philosophical, Order

  "Plato, Our Dear Plato!". Magazine littéraire, no. 447, November 2005.

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• Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.

  Nick Cave

  Guy, Nails, Hammers

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• Ever since Sir Isaac Newton's times, scientists have worked in the same sort of way: They show a great respect for experiment and observation, They don't cherry pick data, They take a skeptical approach to what they do. And then scientists work together to get a consensus as to what should be believed And that generates very reliable knowledge and that reliable knowledge drives innovation

  Paul Nurse

  Data, Innovation, Working Together

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• No matter where the skeptical thought originates, or how it gets access to our minds, we see at once that it flattens the level of life and every aspiration. It makes our character less vigorous. The gospel is not simply a philosophy of religion or law of life, but it is an apocalypse, showing the heavens to our thought, and so bringing its spiritual benedictions to every heart and life.

  Richard Salter Storrs

  Spiritual, Philosophy, Character

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 347), 1895.

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